Omnichannel Foundations: Building Seamless Customer Journeys for Early-Stage DTC & CPG Brands
Learn how to integrate digital, physical, and social channels into a unified strategy that boosts engagement, streamlines interactions, and drives lasting customer satisfaction.
Photo by Edgars Kisuro
Every day as a founder something reminds you that you’re building all of this s--- from scratch.
No blueprint.
No outside funding.
No well-connected network.
But you’re doing it and learning as you go!
Your goal is and still remains the same: Build a company that matches the brand you envisioned that meets the needs of your audience.
Some of you are solo founders “winging it” but still getting it done!
Not only are you growing but the business is as well.
Growth and sustainability is a “long game”, however you need business strategies or actions in place to ensure sustainable and continued growth over time. These initiatives often focus on creating value, building a strong foundation, and positioning the company for future success.
As a founder of a brand, nothing prepares you for the challenges of balancing customers, leads, sales, social media engagement, and email marketing. It may feel like you’re running around all over the place checking DMS, engaging with every person on social media, sending out marketing campaigns, and following up on customer inquiries.
What you need is a seamless process to help you balance it all out. That’s where your Omnichannel Strategy comes in at.
As a customer, you probably never paid attention to it, but you’ve definitely interacted with a brand through an omnichannel. For example, Starbucks. We’ve all either purchased Starbucks directly in-store, the drive through, or in the store’s app. This integration enables people like us to access Starbucks items both online and offline, enhancing the customer experience, while increasing brand loyalty.
An Omnichannel Strategy is a fully integrated strategy that includes multiple channels to create a seamless customer experience, enhancing engagement and customer satisfaction across all touchpoints. Customer touchpoints are how buyers interact with your brand. This can be through social media pages, in-store traffic, email, mobile app, or website.
In simple terms, omni channels offer a personalized customer experience for consumers through a brand’s website, social media page, mobile app, and in-store visits.
The goal is to provide customers with a consistent and integrated experience, allowing customers to interact with the brand that suits their preferences.
I talk about buyer’s journeys a lot in my articles.
Mapping the buyer’s journey can facilitate with understanding where the customer touchpoints are, meeting your customers where they’re at in the buyer’s journey and how to enhance the customer’s interaction with the brand at each point of contact.
Your omnichannel strategy will help you meet customers where they’re at, while assisting you as a founder, with streamlining your existing efforts.
Defining your Omnichannel Strategy
Here’s a few tips to help you enhance your existing efforts to refine your Omnichannel strategy, one that keeps your customers consistently engaged, where you can better understand the customer life cycle, track and analyze data that identifies consumer behavior such as shopping habits. With this information you can prioritize valuable shoppers, driving repeat purchases.
Define The Customer Experience
Decide what a seamless experience looks like for your brand and how you can meet customers where they are. These actions lead to higher conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. Buyers typically desire more than one option to shop brands, whether that is in-app purchases on sites like Instagram, the brand’s website, or in-store. Think about what a seamless process looks like at all of these touchpoints.
Boost Engagement
An effective omnichannel strategy allows brands to engage with customers at multiple points of the buyer’s journey, however, this method requires consistent messaging and a seamless customer experience. Perhaps you might need to create a knowledge base for customers to better understand how to use a product. Maybe you need to start a loyalty rewards program. Deploy chatbots on your website to answer pressing questions.
Data-Driven Insights
Data can be kind of “tricky” depending on the technology and platform used to collect the information, integration, how valuable the information is that was collected. In terms of collecting data through surveys, your questions have to be carefully crafted to obtain the right feedback. Having the right integration tools connecting to various channels enables businesses to streamline processes of marketing, data collection, gathering customer behavior across multiple platforms enhancing marketing efforts, and personalization.
So, the question you’re probably asking is, “how do I make all of this happen? I know where my customers are and I am trying to find a better way to stay ahead of leads, purchases, and customer engagement”.
The answer, Omnisend
No this is not a sponsored ad, and I am definitely not an affiliate.
I’m just sharing tools that can assist with your retention strategies and drive more repeat business to your brand.
Omnisend is a tool designed primarily for ecommerce businesses, that enables segmentation where you can filter audiences based on transaction history, leads, and track and analyze purchase behavior. The platform has premade templates for email campaigns, landing pages, SMS marketing. Users can deep dive into automation reports to compare performance on different channels and track customers who converted.
In closing omni channels offer a personalized customer experience for consumers through a brand’s website, social media page, mobile app, and in-store visits. The goal is to find the right tools and strategy that enables an integrated experience, allowing customers to interact with the brand that suits their preferences.